As a competitive, team based shooter Exoprimal is an outlier. Exoprimal has teams of five slay waves of dinosaurs in a race to the finish line. Dino Survival is the only mode at the moment, where matches are split into two phases. It’s where most have you battling each other for control of a large ring or leaderboard supremacy. The majority of the race is bashing hordes as quickly as you can. With the aim of getting to a “final encounter” where the race is still on. The objective switches to like, escorting a cube, charging a hammer, or sometimes: taking on a radioactive T-Rex covered in purple blisters.
There are three classes in the game: Tank, DPS, and Support. The Witch Doctor, for example, has a cattle prod and can do a spinny leap to get into the action, while some are fairly predictable, like the guy with a big shield. You can switch between classes during a match at any time, but I rarely did it unless another teammate decided they didn’t want to heal people anymore.We once played with a guy who’s basically Overwatch’s Junkrat, and we did well, so, yeah, make of it what you will.
Your first Dino Survival match will be your only one for about five or six hours. I struggled so hard to keep going during those ‘early’ hours. Throughout the day, I got up frequently to look out the window. I even make myself a big glass of orange and mango squash. During that time, I thought about what pleasant European old town I could’ve visited. And from the laminated menu I could’ve ordered an iced coffee and a piece of cake. You’ll often find more lizards or final encounters besides escort missions if you stay strong for ten hours or more.
The game’s best moments lie in those unpredictable story beats where you’re suddenly facing the T-Rex equivalent of a raid boss in a pulsing purple arena, or gazing at the horizon as a portal swells and expels a swirling mass of Pterodons so dense it’s like they’re painting the sky black. These scenarios, however, are bound to repeat themselves as dinosaur swarms will become predictable deposits as the wildness of a literal swarm will be reduced from an overwhelming barrage.
Honestly, there’s a tension here between Exoprimal as a singleplayer experience and a multiplayer one, since the story, which revolves around the mystery of a dangerous AI battling these dinos, ticks along mysteriously in the background and occasionally shows itself. On the one hand it doesn’t want to intrude, and on the other hand, it forces you to clock in a certain number of games to shift the timeline forward and unlock the coolest things. In my opinion, it’s neat how they’ve tried to be a little more transparent with the story, since most live service games and especially hero shooters just let fans fill in the blanks. The fact that so much variety is buried behind a story that purposefully inches along just makes me mad.
As for Exoprimal’s dreaded live service elements, they are exactly what you’d expect. A battle pass filled with coins and dangly bits for your guns and zebra skins and dance emotes. There’s also a cash shop. All very vanilla, but at least it’s not pay-to-win. Besides some mech suits and some dull upgrades, there isn’t much to chase. You’ll have a lot of fun here if you want a team-based shooter where you can zone out for a while.
